1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the design of digital circuitry for performing arithmetic operations. More specifically, the present invention relates to a method and an apparatus for quantifying a number of identical consecutive digits starting from a fixed position within a string of digits.
2. Related Art
As computer networks grow increasingly more powerful, it is becoming possible to communicate streaming video over a computer network to be displayed on a remote computer system. One of the challenges in doing so is to compress the video data so that it can be transmitted efficiently across the computer network. During this compression process, one commonly performed arithmetic operation is to quantify run-lengths of identical digits in the stream of video data. This allows a compression algorithm to efficiently compress sequences of identical digits. Note that this quantification process must take place rapidly to keep pace with the bandwidth requirements of streaming video. Unfortunately, existing video processing circuitry is typically unable to quantify sequences of consecutive identical digits in an efficient manner.
The run-length quantification operation also occurs in other common computational tasks that are not necessarily related to video compression. For example, during a floating-point arithmetic operation, it is often necessary to normalize the result of the floating-point operation by eliminating leading zeros. In order to do so, the floating-point circuitry must somehow determine the number of leading zeros in the result. Note that this normalization process must take place as rapidly as possible in order to achieve optimal floating-point performance.
Hence, what is needed is a method and an apparatus for quantifying the number of identical consecutive digits within a string of digits in an efficient manner.